China is introducing a sweeping reform to its outdated residence
system, which divides its whole population into agricultural and
non-agricultural categories.
The existing system, introduced in 1958 to meet the needs of a plan
economy and restrict excessive growth of urban population, is now
becoming a barrier to the free flow of human resources needed by a
market economy.
Wu
Dongli, a bureau chief with the Ministry of Public Security, said
Wednesday small cities across China and a few medium-sized ones
have begun to give farmers and their family members unrestricted
access to permanent urban residence rights, provided they own
residence in the cities and have stable sources of income.
Without permanent urban residence rights in China, people are not
eligible for the wide-ranging essential benefits available to
urbanites, including employment, education and social security.
The reform is changing all this, making unprecedented choices to
its some 900 million countryside population.
Two months ago, a young man surnamed Liu from rural Hunan
Province in central China, together with his family became
permanent residents of Shijiazhuang, capital of north China's Hebei
Province, thanks to a radical residence reform introduced on August
1 this year.
As
a permanent resident in the city, Liu and his family are now
eligible for a number of services previously reserved exclusively
for local urban residents, such as access to local schooling for
his three children.
The small and medium-sized cities that have permitted greater
freedoms in residency are joined by many crowded cities such as
Beijing, Shanghai, and Shenzhen, which offer flexible temporary
residence permits to their much-needed professionals from other
part of the country.
Hebei province, encircling Beijing, also plans to allow 10 million
farmers to become permanent urban residents in small cities in the
next five years.
Li
Keqiang, governor of central China's Henan province, announced
recently that a total of 15 to 18 million of the province's rural
residents are expected to become permanent residents in small and
medium-sized cities in the province over the coming five years.
South China's rich province of Guangdong, which borders Hong Kong,
plans to scrap the practice of dividing its population into
agricultural and non-agricultural categories.
Guangdong provincial officials said Guangdong will register its
residents according to their places of residence, and introduce
unified and non-discriminatory rights of abode to all residents in
the province.
Cai Fang, director of the Population Institute of the Chinese Academy of
Social Sciences, a major Chinese think-tank, said the outdated
household registration system has long been blamed for inefficient
distribution of human resources, resulting in an excessive
concentration of people in urban areas and a brain drain from
developing areas.
Economists say a free flow of human resources is a natural
prerequisite for a market economy, and regional economic
integration will be hindered if the restriction is not removed.
The system, which had remained virtually untouched until early this
year, confines urban residents to cities and towns with housing,
medical, education and employment benefits, and farmers to rural
areas.
Farmers, however, are denied the benefits available to their urban
counterparts and are permitted to seek only low-paying jobs shunned
by urban residents.
Therefore, urban residents in China have been an object of envy by
several hundred million rural countrymen, and becoming an city
resident has been an impossible dream for the vast majority of
rural Chinese.
The dream, however, appears to be within reach for many rural
residents as China's 23 years reform and opening have left the
system obsolete, and millions of farmers have been hired by
companies in urban areas to meet the demand for blue-collar
workers.
China plans to build 10,000 more key small cities and towns in the
early part of this century to boost rural development and absorb
more than 40 million of the country's 900 million rural
residents.
About 55,000 small cities and towns have been built during the past
several decades, turning 100 million rural residents into city
dwellers.
At
present, there are nearly 400 million people living in cities,
setting a record urbanization rate of 30 percent, still less than
the world's average urbanization rate of 50 percent.
But officials and experts have warned it takes a long time for
crowded big cities in China to provide non-local residents with
unrestricted access to residence and their employment markets.
They argued that the already overstrained infrastructure in big
cities like Beijing and Shanghai cannot cope with the vast number
of jobless laborers across the country, which some experts put it
at least 200 million.
( November 1, 2001)